


Deep Water Under Reichenbach Falls

by RuthlesslyEfficient



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Gen, Loneliness, Lonely Sherlock, Reference to Drug Use, You pretended to be dead for two years!, but no actual drug use, pre-3x01 The Empty Hearse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22365457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuthlesslyEfficient/pseuds/RuthlesslyEfficient
Summary: "During the worst of his times as a junkie, Sherlock had spent some unpleasant nights in some unsavory places surrounded by all manner of unappealing persons. This had prepared him, in some ways, for the nature of his mission."Sherlock's rather opposed to personal revelations, but he has a few during the 23 months and one week he spends away from Baker Street anyway.
Kudos: 7





	Deep Water Under Reichenbach Falls

The lorry that entered the Chunnel at Folkestone was carrying a couple thousand pairs of high-end trainers and the recently deceased Sherlock Holmes.

He was in a long, slim wooden crate that was a little too much like a coffin for Mycroft to not have been making some sort of sick joke. It was dark in the box of the lorry, even darker in the crate. Sherlock had counted as 14 smaller crates filled with trainers were stacked above him. The image of John talking to his headstone fresh in his mind, Sherlock didn't like the box one bit, but he shoved that aside and entered in his Mind Palace in an effort to make the tedium of the journey pass more quickly.

They arrived in Calais before Sherlock had time to make much progress in planning how to dismantle Moriarty's network. Despite his distaste for this method of travel, he found himself annoyed when the lorry halted and the motor died, jarring him back to the here and now. There was a slam slam as the driver and his partner got out of the cab. Sherlock waited somewhat impatiently as the workmen unloaded their cargo, rolling his eyes in lieu of an indignant retort as the men exclaimed in French about how bloody heavy this one was. They ignored the "fragile" markings on his crate and dropped it carelessly on a floor that must have been concrete, if the sound was any indication.

Sherlock listened as the men chattered about which crate should be stacked where and insulted one another, then as their voices faded when they went to square their import with the warehouse manager. He hit the mechanism that broke out the side of the crate's false bottom and wiggled out.

The floor (it was concrete) was cold and the warehouse cool, a stark contrast to the stuffy crate. He gave his hair a ruffle, but it was stubbornly flat after the journey. Sherlock grabbed the small pack that had made the trip tucked in the crate at his feet, picked himself up and strode out of the building. He walked past the office where the lorry crew and the warehouse manager were arguing about the delivery without anyone noticing him.

About 175 kilometers traversed, he thought to himself; who knew how many lie ahead and how uncomfortable they would be.

He thought of John again, his face as he'd told Sherlock that "friends protect people," and squared his shoulders.

"Best get going, then," he muttered to himself, and those were the last words of English he spoke for months.

\----- 

During the worst of his times as a junkie, Sherlock had spent some unpleasant nights in some unsavory places surrounded by all manner of unappealing persons. This had prepared him, in some ways, for the nature of his mission. 

Most of the time, he was living out of truly appalling hotel rooms or rundown slum apartments with the occasional stolen car thrown in. He had to spend time with moron after thug, following the thread that connected them to one another and back to Moriarty. He blended in quite well, he thought to himself, well acquainted with how to be slovenly and mean. 

John would probably not have fared well on this mission, he thought to himself. Not because of the conditions, so much - John had slept rough on the desert sand or on the floors of abandoned houses more than once during his time in the army and wouldn't have complained much about a filthy cot in a dank warehouse. No, it was the morally bankrupt company that John could not have tolerated for so long. Possibly Sherlock himself included after he had to get his hands dirty to get in with the right (or wrong, depending on perspective) people. 

\----- 

Sherlock was in Brno, four months after he died, the first time he killed a man. 

He was rather good at it, he thought to himself after. He certainly wasn't the shot John was, but he wasn't firing from a distance that required any sort of marksmanship. It was his commitment that made him effective. 

"The boss," his target was explaining in Czech, "wants us to take the cargo across the border into Germany, and the others will pick it up there to take it to Belgium." 

Sherlock - who was Andrej, lately - grunted. He'd found he got a lot further with the fools when he kept his mouth shut most of the time and just let them spill their secrets. 

"We pick up the cargo Friday," the target continued. "Cross the border two days later. I know a border agent I can bribe to get us across without getting caught." 

Sherlock didn't say anything, just kept marking down how many rifles were in the crates stacked in front of him. 

The target suddenly grinned, an unsettling expression on the face of a violent man. "A shame, the sale," he said. "I checked the cargo last week. Prime meat. There's one I wouldn't mind keeping for myself; they're the sweetest when they're that small. Makes it so easy." 

If Sherlock had been anyone else, his eyes would have widened as he realized what the cargo was. Instead, he merely grunted again. 

"Who's the contact?" he asked, his tone casual as he meandered closer to the target. 

The target listed a name and meeting location that Sherlock quickly committed to memory. Then he reached into the target's waistband, pulled his gun, and calmly shot him in the back of the head. 

Getting rid of the body was easy. Explaining the target's disappearance was even easier. 

\-----

It was much more difficult to blend in once he reached Myanmar. He was too tall and too pale, too obviously European. 

It didn't help that word of his workings had spread. Not who he was, exactly, but that the syndicate was being eradicated by a strange, brilliant man with an uncanny knack for finding the co-conspirators. Without Moriarty to keep things going, fear forced the scum of the earth even further underground. 

Sherlock followed them into their burrows, appearing in a long, short warehouse as a breathless Dutchman with a tale of a raid by the royal police and a happenstance escape. The leader of the operation here, a short, slight man with a receding hairline, bought it. 

Almost too easy, he found himself thinking, it having been so long since he had used English that he was no longer certain which language he was thinking in. Almost too easy that these men see you and accept you so readily as one of their own. 

Idiots. 

Perhaps the healing cut on his temple was reassuring, he thought as he studied himself in the bedaubed mirror of a dark bathroom. 

Or perhaps it was the coldness in his eyes; the emptiness; the way he had nothing and no one to lose. 

Sherlock looked around the small, dank bathroom. 

God, it would be so easy to get heroin here. 

Then a voice in his head, steady like John's, knowing like Mrs. Hudson's: Nothing to lose. But maybe something to be found. 

Mandalay fell.

\-----

At least in South Africa he could usually speak English. 

\-----

Norway was so close to England and so, so far away.

Sherlock had crippled Moriarty's enterprise irreparably, but there was more work to be done. If the operation was a spider web Moriarty had spun, it was now holding on by only a few stubborn lines of silk. Sherlock just needed to cut them away and it would be no more. 

He lay in a dirty bed in a dirty hostel looking up at a dirty ceiling. He had not eaten in 12 hours. He had not showered in four days, had not slept in two. He had not spoken to another human being in perhaps eight. 

He had not stood in 221B Baker Street for 21 months and 17 days. He had not spoken to John for 21 months and 16 days. He had not seen him for 21 months and 13 days. 

"Alone is what protects me," he had told him in the lab in St. Bart's. That was especially true, lately. The solitude was Sherlock's armor. 

But if he had learned anything in the last 21 months and 13 days, it was how high a price it was to pay. He missed the steady presence of John, walking at his right side or reclining in his chair across from Sherlock's in front of the fire at 221B. He missed Mrs. Hudson's "yoo-hoo" as she came up the stairs, bringing him this or that from the shops. He missed Lestrade's slumped shoulders, weary eyes and determined expression at a crime scene. He even, as much as he hated that it was true, missed Mycroft and his damn umbrella and smug expression. 

If someone had asked him, right at that moment, as he lay in the dark of an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar land, he would not have be able to lie. He missed home. 

"Stop whinging and get up," he said aloud to himself. "You'll get nowhere if you just lay here. Get up and find the next piece of the puzzle." 

Sherlock stood. 

\-----

Sherlock was relieved when Mycroft stepped into his cell, though there was nothing on this earth that you could have given him to admit it. He had rather expected to hear from him soon. Not only was he about to cut the last thread of Moriarty's web, he'd gotten word that he had been exonerated and knew Mycroft must have been burning each of Moriarty's lies in preparation for something. 

He had not seen John in any of the news coverage. If the reporters had gone to him for comment, he had told them to shove off. There were no updates to his blog. 

It had been 23 months and one week since they had spoken. 

Mycroft, of course, settled in on a chair, taciturn and placid even as the Serbian fool struck him again. The manacles around Sherlock's wrists had been cold when they'd been locked in place; he'd been there so long that now they were warm. His ribs and shoulder blades and back were screaming in a way that told him they would continue doing so for days; perhaps weeks. 

But then the Serbian fool was dead and Sherlock's mission was done. 

"Back to Baker Street, Sherlock Holmes," Mycroft told him. 

Hidden behind his filthy curtain of hair, curls utterly out of control, Sherlock grinned. 

He pulled himself to his feet as Mycroft unshackled him and pushed his hair back, assuming as dignified a bearing as one could when one was dirty and shirtless and barefoot and bleeding and in desperate need of a haircut. 

"Good, then," he said. "I've rather been missing my chair." 


End file.
